Turns out the biological lens of your eye blocks UV light, but if you get an artificial lens, your retinas can register UV light.

There's some natural variation. I can see near-UV -- this caused some confusion in high school Chemistry class when I could see some spectrum lines that nobody else could.

I've got the mild form of color deficiency that reduces my total hue resolution from about 10 million colors to about 2 million colors. Maybe my cones register UV better too as a side-effect.

Oh, and I'll happily stick with two million colors if the alternative is a freaking needle in the eye. Eyedrops - let's talk.

A couple of BD-Rs stored in a safe deep deposit box or over at a relative's house.

My bank charges $60 a year for a box - that's less expensive than any of the online services for large quantities of data. The real costs are a function of how much data you want to backup and how much redundancy you want offsite. For instance, for the 6TB drives I'm using, to have two onsite and two offsite costs twelve hundred bucks now, which compares favorably with tape solutions. I tend to upgrade backup drives every other year and trickle down the backup drives to servers and workstations, so it's not a sunk cost necessarily.

I prefer ZFS mirroring over LUKS aes-xts devices, the security of which entirely depends on how good your passphrase is. So don't be stupid and lazy in that regard. If your passphrase is really good, you shouldn't worry about anybody getting ahold of your drive.

Unless you live in a swing state, your vote pretty much doesn't count.

There's so little chance that your vote will count that it's pretty much not worth being informed on the issues. This causes an obviously bad cycle, which is easily exploited by concentrated interests.

If somebody was selling a product with a code-base that operated on rules this good, they'd scrap it for a rewrite. At least in a market that offers anything but a monopoly product.

He's *already* become a generic right-wing kook.

As if there were any other way to gather the requisite delegates to win the nomination.

Let's put it this way - if Murray Rothbard wanted to strategically win the nomination, he'd have to run like Rand.

If Saddam was still in power, ISIS wouldn't have been a threat to them. We weakened Iraq.

It's not merely that subtle. The USG actively funded and trained the groups that became ISIL. Now that Iran is funding their opposition, the USG can fund both sides of the conflict and be both allies and cold-war opponents with several of the participants.

Did somebody mention "stop meddling"?

Also, for complex plotlines (see: "Lost"), people tend to forget important events that happened weeks prior

In my day, we had to remember dialog from three years back to appreciate B5. Might be why it got cancelled a few times...

Nah, this idea has been invalidated by economists.

The cost to replicate complex inventions is about 65% of the original cost and the overhead of paying the talent to have on staff to do the work (they insist you fund their own research instead of sitting idle) is almost 35%. The Patent argument boils down to dithering about a 5% difference and the consumers prefer to reward the inventors most of the time. Establishing and enforcing the patent monopoly winds up costing society more than that 5%, so the net effect is privatized gains and socialized losses.

Now there are industries that government screws up a priori, like pharmaceuticals, but patching that disaster with patents just adds insult to injury.

Speaking as someone who was just offered a drug for a family member that costs $320,000 per ounce (beyond the budget) I can tell you the current system doesn't help regular people at all. Bristol Meyers execs - they're doing just fine.

The current system *does* work very well - for certain classes of men. And the claims that people will stop inventing without monopoly enforcement ignore all the available data and human nature.

"Social Contract" is just bullshit Rousseau made up to replace the Divine Right of Kings, which had gone out of favor.

State your preference and add "social contract" to the end - it's easy and profitable.

There needs to be an active mechanism in government that weeds incompetence and ignorance out of the system.

You're looking for competition. That's the opposite of government.

There are many types of governance - you can't pick the one that eschews competition (government) and say, "we need competition in it". That would be to undefine it.

So WTF does the FTC get to decide on global things for?

Are you confusing a widely-acceptable excuse with a logical predicate?

ICANN just needs to say, "look, we ran this by the FCC and they said it was OK". That will satisfy most people that ICANN is in the clear and maybe that rightsholders shouldn't bother tying up the courts for a decade.

Oh, and then ICANN says, "here's where to mail the check for the ICANN fees." Do you think they truly care if the FCC has jurisdiction or if their money keeps coming in?

Having a Core i7 will not actually feel more responsive in everyday tasks compared to a Core M if the i7 is paired with a spinning rust disk and the Core M has a PCI E SSD.

Cool - I'll transcode a 900MB .dv clip to h.264 with ffmpeg on my 4-core hyperthreadding i7 (the low-power model, even) with a simple drive mirror, and you run it on your Core M with a PCIe SSD (on a Mac even), and let's see when each job finishes.

(as usual, use the right tool for the task)

"on the right side of history" This phrase has always confused me. Unless you are a prophet or time traveler, how do you know you are on the "right side" of history until a significant enough time has passed?

Look at long-term trends.

Two thousand years ago personal freedom was rare and people were the per se property of their Sovereign. Warring was common, dueling was how arguments were settled, and people drowned their extra babies. Human life had fairly little social value and everything was controlled by the whims of the Gods, regardless.

In the more advanced civilizations today, people can do pretty much whatever they want in terms of personal liberty, and there's a bunch of obfuscation to disguise the fact that they're still owned by their Sovereign (because they wouldn't accept it consciously). Cooperation is markedly increased, resulting in the march of technology.

The safe bet is for the trend-lines to continue towards more tolerance, more personal freedom, more blessings of enhanced communications and technology, and a sunset of the nation-state as the pervasive governing mechanism.

There's no guarantee, but the trends are very strong with only slight perturbations, so to bet against it is a fools' errand. To bet on more authoritarianism, more mercantilism, and more central planning while betting against more peace, more tolerance, and more liberty is a great way to be considered a fool, in history books written far enough into the future (there are always short-term gains for such sociopathic behaviors, so don't expect the history books written tomorrow to judge yesterday's tyrant harshly).

Historians in 3015 may judge this post harshly, but I wouldn't bet on it.

then what the fuck have we to lose by figthing for what's right?

Comfort and complacency? If you set the value of freedom to zero, there are still other benefits to be enjoyed. Perhaps you've heard of "bread and circuses"? (this isn't a new problem).

I'd rather be suicidal and on the right side of history than get to live a meek, shallow little existence cowering in my hole waiting to die

Realize that you're in a small minority. And in a democracy, the majority gets to enforce their view on you that your freedom doesn't matter.

"The blessings of liberty are occasionally fought for and earned by the few, then temporarily bestowed on the undeserving masses, to be lost again when they forget why they had achieved happiness".

They decided to go ahead anyway.

Of course they did - 18 cents on every single domain registered goes to ... ICANN! Why get 18 cents from every trademark holder when you can get 18 dollars?

Now they are shocked, hurt, and betrayed that someone would be using one of the new TLDs for less than upstanding purposes. What utter fools.

I doubt they care. They want the FTC to bless it as free speech so they can wash their hands of any culpability.

So, where are all the environmentalists demanding we build integral fast reactors as fast as we can? We have a huge 300,000 year light-water-reactor waste problem, a huge CO2 problem, and only one source of energy that can satisfy all the demand that humans have and will have as the other billions are lifted out of poverty. There's only one known technology that cleans up the mess and provides the power.

But how does solving the problem concentrate power in the hands of governments, right? Big shocker that it was Al Gore who lead the charge to cancel the IFR program. Total coincidence. That's why Obama won't even take Branson's calls about building them now, on his dime.

Just tax carbon and the oceans will be saved, amirite?

The silver lining is that China will build them and eventually America will be forced by the harsh realities of economics to buy them from the Chinese manufacturers, as China replaces the US as the center of industrialization. Unless Americans start refusing to be controlled by sociopaths first.